Monday, May 15, 2006

Moving to Portland without leaving

After another very soggy weekend here in lovely Twinstown, it seems like those of us who had an opportunity to move to Oregon, but did not, are living Oregon anyway. My in-laws live about 3 miles from me and they received about 2.5 inches of rain in their rain gauge over the weekend, which brings our yearly precipitation total up to approximately 475 feet. I may be exaggerating a bit, but not much. You know you're in trouble when you wake up in the morning and find that lichens have replaced whiskers on your face.

I own a machete with a two foot blade that I acquired in 1979 when I was an exchange student in Guatemala. (As an aside, and to show you how much things have changed, I brought it on the plane with me when I came home and no one said a word.) It is looking like I'll need to put it to use in the yard, given the way everything is growing right now. It is astonishingly green here right now, much like Portland appeared when we went to visit last December. I'm running out of adjectives to describe it and I may require a trip to my daughter's Crayola box to find the proper words to describe what I'm seeing.

And in this incredibly wet spring, we still find the solons in St. Paul debating new stadia for the Twins, Vikings, Gophers and other potential late entrants (perhaps the Augsburg Auggies or the Gustavus Gusties are lacking in infrastructure). As we entered the hated but dry Metrodome on a very soggy Saturday evening, we were all glad that we got to see a baseball game. Had the Twins set up residence on the other side of downtown, it would have been a rainout. While the debate over a new stadium is more complicated than that, it's something to consider.

They don't worry about those things in Portland, from what I can tell. The city has a very nice Triple A park and there seems to be no enthusiasm to build something that might attract a big league team. Perhaps Oregonians have less of an inferiority complex than Minnesotans do. I'm not sure, but the long-standing crack about Minneapolis becoming a "cold Omaha" seems to animate much of the discussions of these issues. I would have suggested that we could become a "dry Portland," but given the forecast for the week, there's no chance of that happening.